These Trackpad Winamp Visualizations Really Whip the Llama’s Ass

As much as we like a good clean Model M specimen, those curly-corded clicky behemoths are somewhat lacking for certain flavors of gaming. There aren’t any blank keys to override, and there sure isn’t a full-color trackpad that you can write apps for. [Gus] has such a keyboard: the Razer Deathstalker Ultimate which features the SwitchBlade UI. He made himself this sweet audio visualizer for it that extends Winamp visualizations to the Switchblade UI.

[Gus]’s hack is built on the Tiny3D visualization framework. It does what you might expect—reads the visualization values, sets them up for display on the trackpad, and renders them to said trackpad. [Gus] uses some of the 10 programmable keys to change colors on the fly, and the result is pretty awesome. As [Gus] points out, this is just the beginning of what the plugin can do. You’ll need the Razer SDK to get started, and you can get the other ingredients from [Gus]’s repo. Once you’re done with this, you could try auto-dimming your keyboard backlight.

I have a Blackwidow with Brown Cherrys and Some Blue for gaming, The odd thing about the KB is that is appears as “1 USB HID Keyboard Controller and 2 Mice”, and I refuse to use the RAZER software that “SYNAPSE” Junk, yet they’re making their claims of a Programmable KEYBOARD which is a LIE if the blackwidow And the mice they sell were programmable synapse would only be needed to program as this is not the case i find them to be Liars and Imposters.

You are on _hack_aday so why not _hack_ the keyboard to work like you want it to?
A microcontroller with at least one USB device port and one host port should be enough.

Honestly some of the programmable functions couldn’t be done on the device side alone so using a software layer for added functionality isn’t that strange. You did read the specifications of the keyboard before buying BTW?

This ^.
I have a Blackwidow and the thing is so heavy that I wouldn’t want to move it away from my desktop anyways, so I don’t see the need to store settings on the keyboard itself. Also, even if you did, there’s cloud storage for your settings. Which I think is better, given that I’ve had to replace my keyboard due to spilling a drink on it. Just plugged the new model in and all of my old settings and macros were there and working with no setup. If someone is really so bothered by having to keep Synapse running then do what I did and write an AHK script to monitor/launch it.

Also, who the hell buys a peripheral nowadays a then goes “3rd party software, I’m not using that crap”. Video cards, Oculus Rift, Leap Motion, pretty much every modern peripheral that adds any kind of extra functionality requires some form of added software layer. Not using it out of spite is just stupid.

Oh, and Synapse is pretty powerful if you take the time to learn how to use it… you know, 10 minutes.